Poor Elijah’s Almanack: Education appetizers

Chefs serve appetizers to whet our anticipation for the rest of the meal, which for us is the rest of the school year. Here’s a tray of delicacies from education’s cordon bleu experts.

Alongside the ongoing turmoil surrounding the Common Core’s “creation and adoption,” an Education Trust study of “implementation” reports that most classroom assignments “do not reflect the high level goals” specified in the Common Core’s grade level standards. Investigators rated “fewer than forty percent” as “aligned with grade appropriate standards,” with a “mere six percent” identified as “high range,” prompting assertions that the data reflect deficiencies in “where teachers are in their understanding” of the Core’s “higher standards.”

It’s hardly surprising that teachers haven’t universally embraced the Common Core. This latest incarnation of high standards, like its predecessors, was concocted in a vacuum, an experts’ brew of nonsense and common sense. It’s true, as one Core booster lamented, that written “standards are a lot easier to change than the habits and practices of teachers.” Writing lofty, implausible things on paper is commonly a lot easier than actually doing them. However, the problem with “higher standards” is less where teachers are and more where students are in their “understanding.”

It’s undoubtedly convenient to leave students’ abilities, apathies, and home lives out of the achievement equation, and it’s fine to endorse high expectations, but wishing something, or teaching it, doesn’t make it so. If what I’m teaching my students and the assignments I give them don’t conform to the Common Core blueprint, maybe that’s because my students don’t conform to it. It’s ironic that education’s experts champion “student-centered learning” while they systematically ignore where students are.

Speaking of expectations, inadequate parent involvement has long been recognized as an “impediment to student achievement.” Recently, however, a social psychology research project concluded that “helicopter” parents’ famously “intense involvement” can also “lead to dangerous dead ends.” This newsflash is hardly news to anyone, from kindergarten teachers to college counselors, who deals on a regular basis with students long on self-satisfaction and short on perseverance.

The study investigated what happens when parents’ “aspirations,” what they “want” their child to achieve, exceed their “expectations,” what they “believe” their child “can” achieve. Researchers described this “overaspiration” as “poisonous” to student achievement.

Parents may be guilty of harboring loving but unrealistic dreams for their children, but education experts and officials have turned overaspiration into public policy. Their bandwagon slogans, from “all students will succeed” to the impossible Common Core promise that every child will graduate “college and career ready,” are enshrined in federal law. No Child Left Behind is dead. Long live Every Student Succeeds.

On the equity front, based on data suggesting black children are “1.4 times more likely” to be placed in special ed classes, advocates have long charged that special education has served as a dumping ground “repository” for unsuccessful black students. A 2015 study, however, indicates that compared to “white students with similar academic achievement, behavior, and family economic resources, black students are actually underrepresented” in special ed classes. Now instead of just being condemned for placing too many black students in special education due to racist, low expectations, schools are also being condemned for placing too few black students in special education due to racist, low expectations.

Brain research rounds out our menu. One prominent neuroscientist describes a twenty-first century teenager’s brain as “a Ferrari that’s all revved up but doesn’t have any brakes.” It’s unclear how that makes today’s teenage brains different from the teenage brains of John Quincy Adams and Wally Cleaver, but it apparently accounts for adolescents’ heightened susceptibility to addiction and inclination to risky behavior.

It also explains why some adolescents need more sleep, a phenomenon formerly attributed to “going through a growth spurt,” but now credited to circadian rhythms and melatonin production. Teenage brain “plasticity” accounts for why adolescents are “extremely well-equipped” for learning, but not for why so many aren’t learning much. Meanwhile, the contemporary adolescent frontal lobe, the seat of “judgment” and “empathy,” is less developed than it will be in adulthood, but no less fully developed than it ever was.

When I started teaching thirty years ago, experts cited the impact of tailbone growth on behavior, a contention presumably resting on the assumption that modern adolescent tailbones are different from Renaissance and 1930s adolescent tailbones, and that’s why twelve-year-olds can’t sit still or learn anymore.

The scientific merits of that particular speculation and present-day brain theory aside, the greater danger lies in our willingness to employ science as an excuse for irresponsibility, sloth, and bad behavior. It lies in the false, palliative standard against which we measure ourselves and our students. Yes, adolescents are subject to stress, but today’s school assessments are no more “high stakes” than the SATs my classmates and I sat for. Experts warn that adolescents are prone to becoming “addicted to the Internet” and “gaming,” even as they prescribe the Internet and games as classroom teaching “tools.” And what does it say about the fortitude of American adolescents, even into their twenties, if they find social networking “distractingly stressful”?

How would they cope on a raft in the Mediterranean? How will they cope with real stress and real responsibility?

Well, it’s almost time for dinner.

Bon appetite.

Peter Berger teaches English in Weathersfield, Vermont. Poor Elijah would be pleased to answer letters addressed to him in care of the editor.